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Preserved among the Rawlinson Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, is a manuscript containing various poetical and dramatic pieces, including (in folios 82r-87v) a complete English translation of Book I of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.1 The version seems to be completely unknown, and has never previously been printed. It is of some intrinsic merit, and considerable historical interest as the only separate English version of Book I apart from Dryden’s to have survived from the late seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. The text is supplied below in a modernized ‘reading edition’. MS Rawlinson poet. 3 is a bound volume of large dimensions, its pages ruled with vertical red lines of a kind which suggests that it was originally intended as a ledger. The boards are crudely covered in vellum which seems to have been recycled from a legal document, probably an indenture. Some of the contents are neatly written, while others are of much rougher appearance, showing signs of hasty composition, and containing heavy correction and overwriting. The translation of Metamorphoses I is unique in being set out in a doublecolumn format. Close inspection suggests that, despite its superficially diverse appearance, the whole MS is the product of a single hand. Several leaves (fos. 47b, 48, 49, 88) have been crudely torn out, leaving only fragments of text visible. The contents of the MS are not fully enumerated in the Bodleian catalogue, but have some bearing on the question of authorship. They are as follows

Recent commentary on Dryden's translations of Juvenal can be broadly divided into four main categories. One group of scholars has devoted itself to assembling the range of materials which the poet had before him while composing his versions. As is now well established, Dryden did not simply work from plain texts of his originals, but drew on a remarkably wide variety of commentaries and earlier translations, continually incorporating, adapting, and combining interpretative glosses, phrasing, diction, rhymes, and end-words from these sources in his own rendering. Scholarship over the last fifty years has gone a long way towards establishing the particular editions and translations of Juvenal with which Dryden worked, and on whose phrasing and insights he drew when composing his own versions.2 A second body of commentators has discussed Dryden's Juvenal in the light of seventeenth-century debates about the nature of satire and about the theory and practice of translation. Such critics have frequently followed an agenda set by Dryden's own prose prefaces most notably the Preface to Ovid's Epistles (1680), with its famous tripartite division of translation into metaphrase, 'or turning an Authour word by word, and Line by Line, from one Language into another'; paraphrase, 'or Translation with Latitude, where the Authour is kept in view by the Translator, so as never to be lost, but his words are not so strictly follow'd as his sense, and that too is admitted to be amplyfied, but not alter'd'; and imitation, 'where the Translator (if now he has not lost that Name) assumes the liberty not only to vary from the words and sence, but to forsake them both as he sees occasion: and taking only some general hints from the Original, to run division on the ground-work, as he pleases' (Works, I, 114-15).3 The third category of commentary on Dryden's Juvenal comprises a single, extended item: the late H. A. Mason's celebrated article, 'Is Juvenal a Classic?'.4 Mason's essay stands apart from other studies of Dryden's Juvenal in the prominent use it makes of Dryden's translation as part of an attempt to define the distinctive poetic qualities of Juvenal